In message <1694...@time.cdrom.com> "Jordan K. Hubbard" writes: : Again, it "would be nice", I'm not disputing that, I'm simply saying : that if we don't keep our goalset small, at least for the first couple : of iterations of this, then we won't get it done for any of the *BSDs : (including FreeBSD).

And the number of niggling, little problems that are in the ports when you try to use them quickly convince you that having one ports tree is a logistical nightmare. the openbsd folks sent me a bunch of patches back when 2.2.5 was jelling, so i couldn't commit them to the freebsd tree. to make matters worse, freebsd has libcrypt, while openbsd doesn't. and then there was libgmp. freebsd compresses man pages, while openbsd does. the list is very long and adds up to make most ports not work w/o tweaking on openbsd. in the end, to get working ports they had to get their own ports tree. lots of little things added up to a huge problem.

i guess this is a long way of saying that i agree with jordan. expanding the scope of ports from just current/stable freebsd does come at a huge price that isn't obvious at first blush. the devil is in the details for sure. it is much harder than you'd otherwise think.

Warner